Events

I give you the Cut Stone pizza-oven fire truck: If I hadn't had a big Caesar salad, and (I admit) some mozz sticks, I would totally have grabbed one of their pizzas. They will return to Kenosha's streets in the spring.

Welcome to stop #64 on the Brews and Choos project. Brewery: Rustic Road Brewing, 5706 6th Ave., Kenosha, Wis.Train line: Union Pacific North, KenoshaTime from Chicago: 1 hour, 40 minutes (Zone K)Distance from station: 900 m Kenosha, Wis., is the end of the line for the Metra Union Pacific North Line. It takes a while to get up there, longer than to any other Metra station. (The South Shore Line isn't a Metra railroad.) Plus, the weekday train schedules make a day trip nigh impossible Monday to Friday....

...on Wednesday. And to remind us of this, yesterday didn't get above freezing at my house. It finally went above freezing at 3:04am, according to my thermometer. And at Chicago's official weather station at O'Hare, yesterday was the coldest day since February 21st. Today won't get too much warmer. Still, in about 90 minutes, I'm taking the Brews & Choos Project out of Illinois for the first time. Kenosha, Wis., has two breweries within a couple of blocks of each other and the Union Pacific North Line's...

Fed up with manufacturers releasing Internet-connected products for the home with inadequate security that puts everyone in the world at risk, the UK has finally cracked down: Default passwords for internet-connected devices will be banned, and firms which do not comply will face huge fines. The Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Bill lays out three new rules: easy-to-guess default passwords preloaded on devices are banned. All products now need unique passwords that cannot be reset...

The stew turned out fine, except I used just a touch too much chipotle powder: I also made a lot. Including what I ate, I made about 4½ liters, including the one jar (front row, second from right) of just stew broth: So, two notes to self: Upping the herbs and spices worked fine, except for the chipotle powder. Keep that under a teaspoon next time. Use less liquid. Remember that mushrooms are mostly water. Still, it tasted great, and I get to have it six. More. Times.

Having a day off with no real responsibilities gives me the space to take care of some niggling projects I've put off for a while. First, I finished updating a document for the Apollo Chorus that lists every sit and stand cue and every score marking for our Messiah performances. That took about 8 hours altogether. I also updated my main NuGet packages to .NET 6. As a nice bonus, because of a quirk in how .NET assemblies get versioned, today's release is version 4.2.8000. (I kept the previous release...

John Scalzi is a professional writer, and I am not. That's why he can encapsulate the past year in one paragraph better than I could do in three: Biden’s not perfect by any stretch, and clearly his current approval ratings are, uhhhhh, not great. That said, he is performing pretty much to my expectations, and as well as he can, considering the 50 Democratic senators he has for his majority are actually 48 Democratic senators, one clearly-a-Republican-but-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat-for-lulz, and one...

Today is the 50th anniversary of DB Cooper jumping out of a hijacked airplane into the wilds of Washington State. It's also the day I will try to get a Covid-19 booster shot, since I have nothing scheduled for tomorrow that I'd have to cancel if I wind up sleeping all day while my immune system tries to beat the crap out of some spike proteins in my arm. Meanwhile, for reasons passing understanding (at least if you have a good grasp of economics), President Biden's approval ratings have declined even...

I had planned for Saturday to cap off the Union Pacific North Line segment of the Brews & Choos project with a trip up to Kenosha. I'll still visit the now-infamous city this weekend, but it turns out, I'll have one more spot to visit before completing the first entire Metra line: Elements of Cultivate by Forbidden Root, which opens Saturday, will seem familiar to anyone who set foot in Band of Bohemia during the six-year run for the Michelin-starred restaurant and brewery that carved out one of the...

Welcome to stop #63 on the Brews and Choos project. Distillery: Koval, 4241 N. Ravenswood Ave., ChicagoTrain line: UP North, Ravenswood (also CTA Brown Line, Irving Park)Time from Chicago: 13 minutes (Zone B)Distance from station: 1.2 km (Metra), 500 m (CTA) Koval is the granddaddy of Chicago distilleries. Conventional wisdom is that Koval's owners, Drs. Robert and Sonat Birnecker, taught all the other Chicago distillers how to make spirits. Conventional wisdom is also that everyone else does it better....